In the novel The Master and Margarita by the Russian author Mikhail Bulgakov, on which the film is based, three story lines are interwoven: a satirical story in which Satan, going by the name of Woland, appears in the Moscow of the 1930s to deal in a hilarious manner with the corrupt lucky ones—the bureaucrats, toadies, poets, and profiteers—in the Stalinist era, a second one d...